Alice Fulton - Works

Works

Alice Fulton has suggested that poetry is a "model of the way the world works." Her poetry has been described as “intricately crafted, yet expansive — even majestic — in its scope and vision. One senses there is something startling about to be revealed in these poems, and indeed that mystery or tension often resolves in powerful acts of linguistic reckoning, as if a piece of psychological origami were unfolding before our eyes." The editors of Twentieth-Century American Poetry suggest that “In her drive to freshen poetic diction, avoid cliche and sentimentality, and create 'skewed domains‚' in her poetry, Fulton has distinguished herself as one of the most original American poets writing today. She has succeeded in challenging not only assumptions about gender roles, but also the assumptions underlying current modes of poetry such as the autobiographical, first-person lyric or the experimental 'Language poem.' "

In his introduction to Fulton's first book, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, W.D. Snodgrass reads Fulton's poetry as a rare example of logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words") and writes that "we are always engaged by ... the sense of linguistic virtuosity... a constant delight ... in language textures, the every-shifting shock and jolt of an electric surface." Newsday, called it an "extremely impressive poetic debut‚" and a Boston Herald reviewer wrote, "Reading her poems is something like listening to a set of the most spirited and peculiar jazz: you must sharpen your spirit to be moved by what is uncanny and rare." While most critical response to this debut volume was positive, conservative critics were "more guarded, or even catty."

Her second collection consolidated the "polyphonic textures," shifts in diction, and signature enjambments that have become hallmarks of her poetry. Palladium is structured in six parts, each focused on the etymology of "palladium" with the trope carried to Ellen Foscue Johnson's palladium photographic print on the cover. One review explained the organizing structure this way: "Etymology breeds metaphor; palladium generates the imagery and energy of the poems, informing them all without necessarily intruding upon them. The organizing principle of an Alice Fulton poem allows for cohesiveness yet is not so narrow or restrictive as to inhibit the flow of associations and ideas. It's as though the world itself were endowed with a centrifugal force, enabling the poet to branch out in numerous directions — parallel lines that manage to intersect on their separate paths to infinity." Sven Birkerts, noting Fulton's "irrepressible inventiveness" and "startling juxtapositions," named this an "aesthetic of profusion." Critics praised these "compressed poems of great texture and inventiveness," as "prepossessing and formidable," "hardwon and solid." Palladium was admired for its "energy and passion for specificity," its "wit and unpredictable, wildly heterogenous combinations," the way "surface and substance, style and content, coexist and are often at odds with one another." Peter Stitt described the style of Palladium as having "so much texture, thanks to images and to her use of words, and that texture places a palpable surface on the abstract construct of the poem." Many critics praised Fulton's "energy," but Calvin Bedient and others were hostile toward the "wicked intelligence" in Palladium. Fulton defiantly included these criticism in the hand-written marginal comments of her innovative "Point of Purchase" in Powers of Congress. Rita Dove in the Washington Post described it as "a wry sendup of academics, featuring a bona-fide poem littered with marginalia from different critics, each with distinct personalities, literary persuasions and handwriting." Stephen Behrendt commented that this poem "comes with its own set of marginal annotations by (and in) several different hands. Not since Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has a long poem presented the reader with so remarkable an example of this particular phenomenon."

Fulton has often referred to Walt Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes" as a guiding principle for postmodern verse. David Baker, in reference to the multiplicity of experience evident in Powers Of Congress, wrote that "Fulton is embarked on a project to redefine or recreate poetry according to the multiforms of experience and intellect, rather than to shape experience by modeling it on a received poetic vision." For Larissa Szporluk, Fulton's "truly phenomenal poetics leave me where I’ve never been, changing the rules of the game of poetry completely." Lawrence Joseph instructs Fulton's reader to "expect a vision of American society — its technological, sexual, class, and religious relationships and context — embodied in language conscientiously intelligent and physical." Commenting on how Fulton's treatment of the "real world is never treated only as an exercise in 'realism'" British poet Rodney Pybus notes the "blessedly unpredictable and unconventional" nature of her use of "psychic and social turmoil." David Barber argues that Fulton's "expansiveness" of subject is realized in "poems that binge not just on language but on lexicons and argots, poems that lift their riffs not only from the deep wells of the American vernacular but from the streamlined vaults of newfangled technology and scientific determinism." Powers of Congress contains many examples of her signature use of polyphony and word superclusters which Fulton has described in interviews and in a 1990 essay on her own poetics, "To Organize A Waterfall."

Sensual Math introduced Fulton's invention of the double-equal or bride sign (see Poetics below). Dorothy Barresi claimed that this work is "what great poetry must do and be" and that "Fulton's poems are like no one else's today‚" with their "on-again, off-again elasticity — a stretching smoothness to some lines, and a snapped back, taut quality to others — that manages to sound both eloquent and scared." Barresi concluded that "Fulton writes with fiery intelligence, and unapologetically so, for it is in the acts of thinking and rethinking that this poet believes we stave off the brute world's numbing assault." Stephen Yenser remarked, "Hers is a maximalist poetry, exploding beyond its boundaries."

Many critics have praised the aural dimension of Fulton's poetry. Writing about Sensual Math, Larissa Szporluk asserted that "Fulton's acoustic signals reign, giving the impression that behind their creation lies some kind of unimaginable technology, telepathic jazz, or just plain genius." Edward Falco corroborated, "Her poems, spoken out loud or 'heard' in the process of reading, offer a subtle, magnificent jazz: a music for the intellect, felt on the tongue and in the body, resonating in the mind. And nowhere is the music of Fulton's poetry more stirring than in Sensual Math." Sensual Math contained a long sequence "reimagining Daphne and Apollo." Donald Riggs writes helpfully about Fulton's translation from the Latin and concludes, "It is within this larger and deeper context that Ovid's tale of Daphne and Apollo takes on, in Fulton's version, an expanded significance: that of the suppression of women's power by the Indo-Aryan patriarchal culture." Building on the music within the poems, the composer Enid Sutherland produced a monumental operatic scoring of this sequence that runs nearly two and one-half hours.

Writing about Felt in The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan also commented on how Fulton's poems are "aurally rich with slant rhymes and musical rhythms." The wordplay present in Fulton's earliest poems has by now become thoroughly suffused:

"In Alice Fulton's poetry, those charged instances when the literal and the metaphysical (and the sensual and the philosophical) overlap are often mediated by wordplay — a pun, a double entendre, a witty turn of phrase. The title of her marvelous fifth collection, Felt, is meant to signify both an emotion once experienced the fabric constructed by fibers that are forcibly pressed, rather than woven, together."

Carol Muske-Dukes has asserted that Fulton's "poetic intuition is a kind of apperceptive proof — never false," concluding that Felt is “fetishistic, wildly associative, demonically apt and simply eloquent, calling to mind Max Planck's quote about the purpose of science as an 'unresting endeavor' developing toward a vision which 'poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.' " Selected from all poetry books published in the United States in 2000 and 2001, Felt was praised by the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award committee as "Full of animated, charged poems." The statement also noted that Felt sizzles with logophilia and tropes, is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop. Hers is a poetic sensibility at once remarkably comprehensive and remarkably precise, and felt; her best book so far is possessed of great velocity, great staying-power." Felt was also selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001.

As with her poetry collections, Fulton's first fiction collection is carefully constructed from interwoven parts "playing off and enhancing the meaning of one another."

What sets The Nightingales of Troy apart from so many other precocious debut collections is Fulton’s knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts. Her best stories not only exhibit her architectural prowess, they also remind the reader of the near-magical capaciousness of the story form.

Donna Seaman notes that "Fulton displays extraordinary verve in the originality of the predicaments she creates for her irresistible characters, her evocation of the majesty of the land and the rise and decline of the town, and her ravishingly inventive language" and that she draws "brilliantly on the vernacular and ambience of each decade." "Fulton’s prose thrives on the tactile, and, as in her poetry, the language is brilliantly precise. While often rooted in the physical, Fulton’s narration frequently moves beyond the immediate, both powerfully and subtly."